How to setup EPEL repository on CentOS 5/6

What is EPEL repository

EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is a project from the Fedora group that maintains a repository of software packages that are not already present on RHEL/CentOS. The repository is compatible with RHEL and all close derivates like CentOS and Scientific Linux.

By using epel we can easily install many packages (around 10,000) with yum command, that are not already present in the centos repositories. EPEL packages are usually based on their Fedora counterparts and will never conflict with or replace packages in the base Enterprise Linux distributions.

So in this tutorial I am going show you how to setup the epel repositories on CentOS

Note - There are many different 3rd party repositories that provide software packages for RHEL/CentOS systems. Some of the most popular ones are RpmForge, RpmFusion, EPEL, Remi etc.
However it should be always kept in mind, that if multiple such third party repositories are added to a system, then it can lead of conflicts. The same package can come from multiple repositories, and some repositories can replace base packages of a system leading to unexpected troubles. Rpmforge and Epel are known to have conflicts.
There are advanced techniques to tackle this like setting up priorities, or selectively installing packages from repositories, but ofcourse these require a lot of effort and so if you are not sure about all this, it is recommended to only use 1 such external repository.

Install EPEL on CentOS

To setup epel on centos, we need to download the epel installation rpm and install it.
The downloads pages for version 6.x and 5.x of CentOS/RHEL are the following

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